Artificial Inhumanity

Posted on September 12, 2026 by Doug Cumming

In the early 1970s, Lewis Thomas wrote an essay about computers that is painfully outdated now. I just re-read it in an old collection called The Penguin Book of America’s Best Essays. To me, reading Thomas’s “Computers” is painful because he was such a great writer in his day, combining the laconic humanist style of his Princeton education with the insights of biological science. He was president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, the cancer research center in New York, and a regular columnist for The New England Journal of Medicine. This essay appeared in that great book, The Lives of a Cell, in which Thomas puts each of his biological and technological subjects into the reassuring perspective of our greater humanity, language, and art. At the time, when I first read the book with awe, this essay seemed a brilliant insight into computers, claiming that they were a long way from replicating the human connections that wrapped the entire globe, like a cosmic cell, in an infinite network of shared “information.”

But that is no longer true, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence.

One thing Thomas missed was the inexorable shrinking of the size and cost of microcircuitry. He imagined the limits of a “machine as big as Texas,” should computers reach that size. And he couldn’t imagine the wealth that our tech oligopolists have amassed today. Another thing he missed is the billion-voiced internet and the way AI has stolen not only 30 years of our infinite human chatter online, but gigantic libraries of what was in books before that. All of it, I say, was stolen without permission or payment and the Big Theft was protected by the delusion that social media companies were merely “common carrier” utilities.

“To match what we can do,” Thomas wrote, “there would have to be 3 billion of them (the population of the world is now around 8.3 billion) with more coming down the assembly line, and I doubt that anyone will put up the money, much less make room. And even so, they would all have to be wired together, intricately and delicately, as we are, communicating with each other, talking incessantly, listening.”

Well, this is exactly what AI is doing, and at speeds that seem instantaneous compared to our slow stroll of thought and need for solitude. In the latest iteration—are you following it?—discreet AI assignments, called “agents,” are working together as “swarms” like bee or ant colonies that need no leader or human oversight. They are poised to conquer unimaginable new realms. The only limit is that they are immaterial, without a physical body. But Incarnation is at hand. Imagine a swarm taking over Waymos, the self-driving cars. Or getting into our nuclear missile systems, heretofore placated by Mutually Assured Destruction (the MAD part that has kept us un-bombed was purely human, remember?). Or a bio lab where a Covid-like virus could be programed to be far more effective than Covid-19 at weeding down humanity.

Alarmists coming out of Anthropic are giving us an apocalyptic warning that AI could kill us all within 10 years. Maybe. Or cure cancer.

But either way, this kind of thinking has given the too-rich oligarchs of Big Tech a feeling that they are gods of a new religion. They are building their own protected paradises in Hawaii and Argentina, or convinced that they can escape Armageddon on Earth for Mars, or somehow achieve digital immortality.

The growing opposition to new data centers seems to be coming from the public’s realization that these High Tech gods are, maybe, completely insane. I hope it’s not too late to pump the brakes a little, at least. I can’t think of any better way to do that than to vote for Democrats up and down the ballot in the coming midterm elections. The Democratic Party may be as discombobulated as the other one. But it least at can bring Congress back to life and bring some accountability to this insanity.

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“I’ll be seeing you”

Posted on August 3, 2026 by Doug Cumming

This next interlude is about the War Years at Tate. No one here remembers that, of course. But it divides the history of Tate in two. Before WWII, Tate had its golf course and lodge. It was in a bubble of light, like the United States.

But a darkness was falling across Europe, and I have discovered a letter in our family archives dated November 10, 1941, that hints at the darkness.

It was to my mother, Emily Wright then, by her 25-year-old cousin Peggy. The original Wright house at Tate was shared in 1930 by my grandfather Douglas Wright and his sister, Aunt Margaret Alston. (Years later, Aunt Margaret built the house on Wildcat Hill that became the Emerson-Erwin-Traylor house.) Aunt Margaret’s daughter Peggy spent her summers as a teenager at Tate in the golden years from 1930 to 1935, riding horses and partying. Her mother took her to France in 1935, where Peggy Alston studied art at the Sorbonne. She met a dashing French painter named Paul Refoulé, and they fell in love. They were married in Atlanta, moved back to Paris, and had a son, Jon Paul. But when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Paul joined the French Army. He was captured near Dunkirk.

My mother, Emily, wrote to her cousin Peggy in her farmhouse in Bordeaux in Vichy France in the summer of ’41, when Mama was 15. Peggy wrote back this 4-page letter. I will read just a paragraph from it.

. . . some day we hope to have a home in Georgia .  .  . I should love to have it at Tate, if Paul’s work will let us live in the country. We can have a mule and wagon and the children could go to the school near the “half way” church. or I could teach them the Calvert system,. . . anyway, all I want now is for Paul to come home to us, safe and well, and then we’ll see when we come back to Atlanta. I hope you won’t feel ashamed of us, as our clothes are all old and shabby and we have seen such sad things and lived thru such terrible days that you will have to teach us to laugh again and to know that life can be good. . . . . How funny it will be to . . . be able to buy all the food we can eat! Sometimes I dream of Lucille Tate’s wonderful dinners! . . .I know Gertrude and Douglas are happy and proud with you children and I am sure Gertrude is much younger and much, much prettier than I am, and I will be perfectly jealous.

A month after this letter, Pearl Harbor changed everything. Paul spent the rest of the war in Nazi POW camps. And Peggy almost starved growing her own food and making their clothes with her son Jon. After the war, they were reunited and moved back to Atlanta, and came to Tate a lot. I loved reading this letter, because of her vision of living at Tate, learning to laugh again and to know that life can be good. That may be the life we are making happen around us now. The end of the letter is a Post Script: “I do hope you all think about planting a few fruit trees up at Tate in the back yard.”

The song you will hear now was the hopeful voice of the War Years, the female dream gal Jo Stafford singing “Ill Be Seeing You.” Ellen Rolader will be signing this beautiful song.

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The Five Deadly Virtues

Posted on April 30, 2026 by Doug Cumming

Like her hero Niccolò Machiavelli, Carol Darr delights in turning conventional (and Catholic) wisdom on its head. So in one chapter of her book Machiavelli 4 Everybody, being published next week, she describes five traditional virtues as “deadly” for a leader.

Narrating the book as if she were Machiavelli, Carol writes with charm and authority. She has had a long career of studying the Renaissance political philosopher, as well as working for Democratic candidates and administrations.

I am using her chapter on “The Five Deadly Virtues” to reflect on whether Donald Trump is truly Machiavellian. He seems so on the surface, but what would old Niccolò say?

Does Trump embody Machiavelli’s twisted logic for a strong leader – or is he following his own twisted impulses instead?

Authenticity – Machiavelli emphasized the importance of hypocrisy – appearing good and honest as a cover for effective badness, “the art of artlessness.” Trump rarely tries to appear “good,” in any conventional sense. He benefits instead from appearing bad – mean, domineering, selfish – and thereby getting credit for “transparency” and honesty (and in our TV culture, great entertainment!). He says what he thinks (if it can be called “thinking”). Getting indicted and convicted in court only seems to enhance his appeal.

So Trump is bad at hypocrisy as an art form. Not Machiavellian at all.

Honesty – Here, the trouble is that Trump is too “honest” about what he thinks, sputtering it late into the night on “Truth Social.” But this “honesty” is chaotic, impulsive and useless. It’s not artfully woven into useful lies as Machiavelli advises. “A prudent ruler does not keep his word,” Niccolò says in Darr’s book, “when it works against himself and reasons that made him promise are annulled.”

Promises made by Trump are pretty useless in the first place, so there’s no value in not “keeping his word.”

Piety – “You may be surprised to learn that of all the so-called conventional virtues, I consider the appearance of being religious the most important,” says Darr’s Machiavelli. “Seriously.”

Trump may try to appear religious at times, saying “God” and holding up a Bible for a photo-op. But in my opinion, anyone who thinks Trump has an ounce of religious faith or devotion must have their eyes closed in constant prayer of wishful thinking. Even devout Christians who support or voted for Trump, I believe, cast him as a bad man inadvertently doing God’s will. Machiavelli understood that piety well-played by a leader supports religion among his people, and that “the social and moral restraints” that religion imposes are more effective than those imposed by the law.

Trump’s favorite book is not the Bible, as he claims, but is Norman Vincent Peale’s best-selling 1952 book, “The Power of Positive Thinking.” As far as that goes, I agree with a quip from Adlai Stevenson (the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for President in 1952 and ’56) comparing that book to the New Testament’s epistles: “I find Paul (the apostle) appealing, but I find Peale appalling.”


Generosity – Machiavelli recommends frugality for a prince. If you give away your own wealth for popularity, you’ll lose the wealth, and your popularity. On the other hand, if you spend other people’s money lavishly, the people will consider it robbery. And if you live in luxury, you are merely displaying the problem with such “generosity” and building resentment.

None of this fits Trump, who famously donates other people’s money (in his own name), drains the public treasury, extorts money from foreign governments and lives amid the most garish luxury known since the Court of Louis XIV.

 “As you struggle to keep up your charitable reputation,” Darr’s Machiavelli writes, “your lavish expenditures will subject you to a double whammy – contempt for having dissipated your wealth, and hatred for having put the squeeze on everyone you know.”

Kindness – “The cruel truth: If you are unfailingly kind, you will find that people will presume too much on your goodwill and will not obey you.”

Now this element seems to fit Trump. Is it better to be loved or feared?  Sia meglio essere amato che temuto? Feared, Machiavelli says in Chapter 17 of “The Prince.” Trump does seem to use fear effectively, at least among his so-called friends.

The proof: Just look at the feeble Republicans in Congress today. In the realm of power politics, fear works better than love.

But in a democracy, there’s another fear – fear of the voters. That’s a check on elected Republicans that might trump Trump in the November elections. We’ll see.

Darr mentions a sixth “deadly virtue” that is within our conventional morality – chastity – but not necessarily good or bad for the prince’s power.

“So long as you’re careful you needn’t pay too much attention to this so-called virtue,” says the cavalier Niccolò. “I never did.”

“Before I blow it off entirely, however, I must caution you about seducing the spouses or partners of your staff and supporters.”

You may be horrified by Machiavelli’s advice. But it is well thought out, and it values outcome for the state, not just for the prince. It is a kind of pragmatism for the safety and unity of his people. This is an important difference between him and Trump.

Machiavelli was smart. He described a variety of tools for winning, not just the hammer blow of intimidation. He cared about what actually worked, not just relying on lucky instincts.

Machiavelli saw two pagan forces at work in politics – Fortuna, the goddess of random events, both good and bad luck, and virtù, the strength of character in a strong leader willing to fight Fortuna and throw off conventional morality when necessary for the people. No one can deny that Trump has benefited from good fortuna. But it is random, and can come to a bad end, e.g. the war in Iran.

By virtù, Machiavelli didn’t mean “virtue” in the Christian sense, obviously. But in neither the Christian nor the pagan sense does Trump ever display this quality of character.

The difference is that Machiavelli is advising a Prince on how to protect and unify his people. The ends justify the means – if it ensures the safety of his people.

 “If you’ve been given this position of leadership,” Carol once explained to me, “you need to use it well.”

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Sic transit!

Posted on April 15, 2026 by Doug Cumming

Germans display their orderliness even in a labor strike. The pilots of Lufthansa joined their fellow workers by holding a two-day strike, April 13 and 14. Danke schön, I picture management negotiators saying, and promptly informing us by email that they will help us find alternative flights.

That was Saturday as we drove to Virginia. We had Lufthansa tickets from Dulles to Frankfurt, and then to Bologna, on exactly those two days.

Lufthansa did indeed find alternatives for us. First, a two-part flight to Frankfurt via London, then a two-part flight to Bologna via Vienna, thus a four-legged flight plan just to get to Bologna. (From there, we would take a bus and train to Lucca, to begin our Camino – our week-long hike to Siena under the Tuscan sun.)

In orderly German fashion, a Lufthansa agent at Dulles named Emed arranged a direct flight to Frankfurt on United, reducing our legs to three. Still, yesterday, Monday, we spent three hours there sitting next to a big-screen video of panda bears and soccer-game highlights, alternating in an endless loop. Then we had more than two hours in Vienna, sitting in a pristine airport coffeeshop next to a German couple talking business. Not like a couple, but more like friendly business partners, at ease in their cool contemporary German way.

When we finally boarded our last flight, on Air Dolomiti, I suddenly realized what we had been missing for past two days. Laughter. Sitting in the full plane of Italians – I had a feeling most of them were Italians – I heard a quick exchange between a woman passenger moving down the aisle to her seat and a man sitting a row in front of us. They spoke, and laughed. They were strangers, but I guess had met waiting at the gate. Their laughter contained all the funny irony we had not allowed ourselves to enjoy about this crazy trip.

I looked up the aisle. All in order, and fairly quiet. But there was just something – something – that told me this was a little strip of Italian culture inserted into our two days of German culture. I was happy with the contrast.

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No Kings draws more than 250

Posted on April 4, 2026 by Doug Cumming

Pickens County Progress, p. 2, April 1, 2026

By Doug Cumming/ Contributing Writer

Among the millions protesting nationwide on Saturday, the peaceful two-hour “No Kings” rally lining a historic block of North Main Street was relatively small – an official count of 262 cheerful sign-wavers. But for Pickens County, it was a very big deal.

 “I’m so glad that it’s finally in Jasper,” said Susan Yandell, a Jasper resident who had to travel to Gainesville for the first two nationwide protests against President Trump last year.

With American flags of all sizes, whistle-blowing and cheers for passing cars, the protesters carried hand-made or downloaded signs supporting the Constitution, peace, affordable healthcare, gospel values, checks and balances and, in one sign, “common decency.”

Dr.  Susan Smith-Stefaniuk, who helped organize the rally for the four-county Appalachian Indivisible, said getting the so-called “First Amendment” permit from the Jasper police was easy this time. She feels like they’re her friends now. But when she first approached the local police last year for a John Lewis Day permit, she felt fear and trembling. 

But the officer she talked to said he thought John Lewis, the late Democratic congressman and civil rights protest leader, was a wonderful man. And now she feels welcomed at the police station, she said.

“Let’s get out there and have some fun,” the family-practice doctor told the crowd gathered at the Peace Park next to the antebellum Kirby-Quinton Cabin and Old Pickens County Jail. “And let them know that we’re still one country, indivisible, with and justice and freedom for everybody.”

Pickens is deep-red Republican. A hot political climate brought out 80 percent of eligible voters in 2024, and 83 percent voted for Trump.  All six incumbents running for county offices this year are Republican. None faced opposition for a primary and none face opposition in November.

Maximilian Rieger, a freelance reporter for the public radio station in Germany, Deutschlandfunk, left the massive No Kings rally in downtown Atlanta to interview protesters in Jasper. “I’m here because I thought it would be interesting to see what it’s like in a red county,” he said.

Most of those in the passing cars, surprisingly, gave thumbs up or waves and honks that at least seemed friendly. Some drove looking straight ahead without expression. A few drivers held up middle-fingers and passed with undue speed or engine roars. 

No police cars were visible. No politicians spoke. But one candidate, Ryan Fountain, the lone Democratic challenger to the 14-year Republican incumbent state House Rep. Rick Jasperse, handed out fliers. Fountain said he has found local people receptive, but is still trying to find an opportunity to talk to the Republican party. “I am trying because . . . in the back of my head I feel like they are decent people that are either misled, or they believe one thing and I feel that I can reach out to them.”

Alan Johnson was wearing a “Pickens Democrats” t-shirt, but expressed the non-partisan nature of the rally. “You don’t have to be a Democrat to be dissatisfied with the status quo,” he said.

Dr. Smith-Stefaniuk said she talked to enough demonstrators to know it was a local crowd. Twenty-five were from Ellijay, 25 from Cherry Log, one family from Atlanta to support their Jasper grandmother, and the rest (200 or so) from Pickens, she said.

Leamarie True, a retired Hill City Elementary School teacher, was pleased but not surprised at the turnout. “Because Trump is being so preposterous,” she said.

In what ways? “Just look at my sign,” she said, pointing to a list of six accusations, like rules she might have written on the blackboard for her students. 

“STOP illegal and unnecessary wars” . . “STOP profiteering from your office,” and so on.

 “He is dishonoring his oath of office,” True said. “He’s supposed to honor and protect the Constitution, and instead he’s tearing it up.”

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Letter to the Editor, Pickens County

Posted on February 26, 2026 by Doug Cumming

Feb. 25, 2026

Editor:

As incumbent Republicans around north Georgia re-think their careers, the tone of the two parties is changing in ways that might surprise you.

National attention is on Congressional District 14, which Marjorie Taylor Greene left open after a spat with President Trump. A special nonpartisan election on March 10 is so crowded with Republicans, a Democrat might make the runoff. He’s a cattle farmer and retired Army brigadier general who is campaigning for affordable healthcare and restoring markets for farmers. 

Democrats closer to Pickens County are sounding similar themes. 

For instance, the two leading Democratic candidates for District 11, which covers Pickens County, are looking to replace Congressman Barry Loundermilk after he decided not to run for re-election. He became the 29th Republican in Congress to skip out on the dreaded Trump mid-term election.

One of these Democrats is Barry Wolfert, a Realtor who plays guitar in a Beatles cover band. He has raised the most money, according to FEC filings, and his issues are affordable healthcare and affordable housing.

The other Democrat getting attention is Chris Harden, who grew up in a trailer in tiny Rossville, Ga. A lawyer and businessman, he says he’s for “restoring common sense and stability.” 

Wolfert and Harden, the only two candidates who responded to their Ballotpedia surveys, are stressing the concerns of average families in Pickens County. They don’t match the caricature that one Republican candidate, Ellis Bachman, has on his campaign website, that “American Conservative Capitalism” must prevail “against the evil attack of Democrat Socialism & The Global Socialist Movement.” 

The candidates who will do well here in 2026, if the traditional mountain spirit of independent thinking prevails, will be those who campaign “against the corruption and corrosion of Washington, D.C.,” and for the rule of law under our Constitution.

That’s on the campaign website of a Republican candidate, Chris Mora, a former chair of the Pickens County Republican Party and former Jasper Rotary president. To me, his position sounds like what I hear from local Democrats. 

Another opening for a Democrat is the local state Senate seat (Dist. 51), including Pickens, since Republican state Sen. Steve Gooch has switched to running for lieutenant governor. The one Democrat running unopposed in his party’s primary is a tough-sounding, churchgoing “conservative” Army veteran named Gary St. Lawrence, who says this: “Georgia has been 100% controlled by Republicans since 2004 – Governor, Senate and House. Our state government is a shambles of corruption, redundancy, inefficiency and allegiance to corporations and rich donors, and no longer functionally serves the voters who aren’t rich or influential.”

If this isn’t what you imagine as your local Democratic Party, take another look.

Doug Cumming

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A Democratic Party “Contract for America”

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Doug Cumming

In May 1994, a conservative politics professor who would be my colleague at Washington and Lee University years later, Bill Connelly, was co-author of a new book on why Republicans were forever losing in Congress. It was titled, Congress’ Permanent Minority: Republicans in the U.S. House.

Later that year, Republican House leader Newt Gingrich released a “Contract for America.”

It was brilliant. It was clear. And it worked – in that the GOP took control of the House for the first time since 1953. And it took the Senate.

Gingrich and co-author Dick Armey had found issues that more than 60 percent of Americans agreed with, and included in the “Contract” eight bills to implement reforms in those “safe” areas. It avoided more controversial issues like abortion and school prayer.

It also described ten bills, less certain of outcome, that it promised to bring to the House floor.

The Contract for America fluffed itself out with text from Ronald Reagan’s 1985 Inaugural Address. It was released six weeks before the Nov. 8 midterm election in President Clinton’s first term.

The Republican Party flipped both chambers, gaining 54 House seats and eight Senate seats. Its legislative agenda was not a great success – most of the Contract’s bills failed or were vetoed by Clinton. But giving the “out” party control of Congress put that branch of government back in play as a co-equal balance, installed Gringrich as House speaker, and set a foundation for a conservative agenda that would grow and grow. The Heritage Foundation, which wrote Trump’s Project 2025, was responsible for most of the ideas in the Contract for America.

Credit for the Republican Revolution of 1995 might not rest entirely on the Contract.

But the Democratic Party should study it closely, and not wait until six weeks before midterm elections Nov. 3 to promise the American people something specific and popular. The Contract, signed by most Republican members of the House and Senate, nationalized the midterms. Democrats should do the same.

Smart people in the national Democratic Party should be able to come up with the wording on bills for things most people care about:

  • Help with the cost of healthcare, including mental health, and healthcare insurance.
  • Affordable quality childcare to provide families with choices and not discourage the having and raising of children.
  • Retain middleclass tax breaks but not for the super rich. Individuals earning more than – pick a high annual figure, including stock values – will be taxed at higher rates.
  • Some kind of reasonable regulation of AI and crypto currency that gives the American people at least a seat at the table with Big Tech.
  • Something about investment in a clean-energy future, emphasizing the opportunities for jobs and restoring America’s standing as a world leader on energy, not an imperialist plunderer of foreign oil.
  • Laws to clean up Congress’s own act. The Contract for America was explicit on ways to make Congress itself more transparent and less corrupt. Democrats could promise campaign finance reform, laws of self-restraint and maybe at least a debate on term limits.
  • A law protecting the independence of agencies whose non-partisanship was assumed, like with the Federal Reserve and the CDC. Also, restoring the role of inspectors-generals and other objective measures for holding government accountable, in both branches. Maybe also a law saying Presidential candidates must release tax forms and their physical reports.
  • A law that make explicit what is in the Constitution already, that the President cannot take or make money (much less, billions from foreign interests) for himself or his family while President. 

Trump is scared of the scenario. The Democrats win both chambers and he may be impeached again – and this time convicted. That may be. Jack Smith has testified about a strong case his team gathered for felony convictions on charges that were not brought in time for a trial. These were criminal charges, on solid law and evidence, that would make Trump the worst kind of criminal in U.S. history since Benedict Arnold.

But a Promise, or Covenant, or Contract from Democrats should be silent on Trump. It doesn’t move the needle to jump on Trump, except in Trump’s favor, oddly enough. This contract should not even propose an obvious Constitutional amendment not allowing a convicted felon to hold office. (He was convicted, remember, on a case much less important than the ones Jack Smith could have brought.)

Beth Macy, award-winning journalist from Roanoke who, after Democratic wins last November, decided to run for Congress.

Nor should it bring up ICE’s Storm Trooper actions, which are social-media content-providers that Trump and Miller have cultivated because it distracts Democrats and Resisters from their best winning issues with a losing issue for the Dems: immigration. All Americans support legal immigration and border security. But, sorry, Joe Biden’s tardiness in stopping a surge in illegal entry was part of his tragic hubris and identity politics. 

Instead, a Democratic contract should focus on laws that will bolster the power of Congress to check abusive Presidential power in the future, Right or Left, so that the legislative branch never again falls into the abyss where it stands today. For example, a law that says the President can’t “claw back” money already appropriated by Congress.

If I spend time this summer knocking on doors in the reddest congressional district in Virginia, which I hope to do for Beth Macy (a fellow retired journalist, author most recently of Paper Girl, pictured here), I want to be able to say what the Democrats will do if they win the House and Senate. And I hope the people I talk to can say, “Oh yes, I know what the Democrats have promised to do.” They may not agree with it, but at least they know what it is.

I don’t think any of us knows what it is yet.

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Indian Summer

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Doug Cumming

The fall sings in full chorus, but it speaks in a whispered word. A scarlet leaf of a sourwood tree whirls in the front yard, then smacks against the porch screen. It holds there, flattened and pinned by the warden wind like a captive pleading with me. Then, after a few seconds, it is yanked away.

It was like the Monarch butterfly I saw on the gravel road, displaying and folding the only bright color of that moldy November morning. The leaf, the butterfly. What were they trying to tell me?

The trees in chorus are something else. They fill the air in harmony, but like a church chorale, the words are hard to discern, English or Latin. In the meadow framing the woods, in this Indian summer sunshine, millions of particles are swirling with the warm breezes. I wonder if they are an offshoot of the uncut grasses, the rusty stalks as tall as fawns. I investigate.

They are insects, countless hoards. An infestation, but harmless. Ladybugs. Herman says no, they are kudzu bugs, swarming because the highway department killed off too much kudzu. I know they’re ladybugs, harmless but with hardshell wings. Their bright yellow or orange bodies, freckled in black (the Monarch’s black borders were freckled in white dots), hit me in the face and hands, so drunk on sunshine they were. Maybe they aren’t so harmless in this infestation. How can so many be around on just this last day or two of warmth in early November? Nature explodes, showing her potential for incredible abundance, or plague. And in contrast, a lone prophet tries to tell us, Prepare for one or the other.

Speak up. I don’t understand.

I lifted the Monarch off the road and set it on a crooked tree. The next day, it was still there, still barely alive. At least the slow wing motions seemed to show signs of art and life.

We like to imagine that the natives who were here before Europe invaded and settled were more attuned to Nature’s words and music. But they had their plagues, wars and hungers. David J. Silverman’s “This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanaug Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of the First Thanksgiving,” depicts an epoch of abundance for the red tribe of Cape Cod. Their God, Kiehtan, had been good. They mastered the maize horticulture that had spread across Indian culture from Mexico for a thousand years, but balanced that with summer fishing, and winter hunting. The women were in charge of edible plantings, which held female spirit and allowed for child raising, while the males were into fishing, hunting, tobacco, and war. They learned of the spirit world from dreams that one of their two souls could visit while the other kept the body alive. And in a special way, for males, from a rite of passage that involved fasting, sleep deprivation and ingesting of emetics and hallucinogens (Bradford’s history, p. 190).

But they were devastated by an epidemic around 1618. So when the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth in 1620, the Wampapaug sachem was ready for trading – which held promise of mutual benefit as well as symbolic meaning for a good relationship. Theirs was a gift economy. Our economy today has some of this understanding, mutual benefit in regulated commerce. But we tend to squash it with fear, distrust and not getting the symbolic, human part.

Phinizy Spalding’s “Oglethorpe in America” also tells a story, from 110 years later and down here in Georgia, of a benevolent and fairly equitable relationship between the colony’s founder and the Creek Indians. The Indians welcomed the treaty Oglethorpe negotiated on friendly terms, and they granted lands that they didn’t use for hunting and living.

The settlers were given to mistrust and fear, but an initial impulse for openness and mutual respect among leaders of both groups laid a good foundation. At least among leaders like the Wampanaug sachem Ousamaquin, the Creek leader Tomochichi, the “Pilgrims” Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins, and the last English knight errant James Edward Oglethorpe. (See Michael L. Thurmond’s “James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist.”)

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For Better or Verse

Posted on October 28, 2025 by Doug Cumming

Living for a couple of seasons in forested hills, our miniature “lake country” of North Georgia, is more than poetic. It is where we turn around on a trail when we hear the low growl of a mama bear, or marvel at the insane chorus of coyotes before dawn. It is where poetry happens, as it did for Wordsworth in his Lake Country.

I once asked a good published poet why she wasn’t writing poetry anymore. It takes too much time, she said. For her, it took about six months between even short poems, and she was too busy being a college dean.

I know what that means. But I have learned that other things are needed besides time to make poems: A little solitude and an interior life; a lot of reading and hearing of poems, and living close to nature and the seasons, away from town. Robert Graves said this about Robert Frost living for 10 years as a (not very successful) New England farmer: “The four natural objects proper to poems are, by common consent, the moon, water, hills and trees; with sun, beasts and flowers as useful subsidiaries.” He didn’t mean only as pretty objects in the poems, but also as the lived-in ecology of the writer.

One other thing is a frameable experience. This can be a burst of consciousness. Or it can be something as dramatic as Hurricane Helene’s devastation in parts of the Southeast last year.  Poems that writers made out of that are collected in a new anthology, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer, who is holding a series of readings around Appalachia. Last night, one was at Blacksburg Books. Tonight, from 6-7 p.m., there’s one at Black Mountain Library. I am glad to see the names of so many poets who will be there (and sorry I won’t join them, though I have a poem in the book): Ginger Graziano, Clint Bowman, Andrew Mack, Gene Hyde, Paige Ghilchrist, Michael Conner, Nancy Martin-Young, Pat Riviere-Seel, Rob Masterson, Whitney Waters, Lee Stockdale, Patricia Crittendon, Laurie Wilcox-Meyer, Paul Kanowski, Jennie Boyd Bull, Amy Tilley, Barbara Conrad, Hilda Downer.

It feels like I’m not doing much here in the mountains. But I do see that I’m writing a poem now and then, more than I used to. Here’s one, from a canoe trip my brother Walter took me on, on the Chestatee River out of Dahlonega.

On the River

A six-legged creature dents a surface that holds,
Making six giant craters in the smooth river shoals.
Then sensing a shadow with globular eyes,
It leaps, to be killed by a dragon that flies.

A million years later, or was it just now,
Two brothers are paddling, one stern and one bow.
The stern one is younger but like his canoe
Knows currents of rivers unknown to his crew.

Connecticut’s head in Vermont, just last week,
Was still in his blood on this slow Georgia creek.
No traffic, small eddies, mud turtles, all sorts,
Guitar for a bow sprit, his dog between thwarts.

Rivers all join, but family trees split.
So a branch from New England became Uncle Whitt,
And great-uncle Roger, on the Chattahoochee,
With a place you could swim from a river-skewed tree.

These brothers, from babyhood dunkings, were keyed
To slack water swimming, a lacustrine breed.
The first time they swam from that man’s riverbank
Was as if from some mystical liquor they drank.

What’s this? Moving water! The soul set aflame!
Like St. Stephen, the young one was never the same.
Rapids that plunge and rocks backward churning,
Waves for their origin endlessly yearning.

The spirit was restless that took him to go
Eternally seaward, whether tandem, solo,
Westward or eastward – the call was the sea.
The push was for Selfhood, for Being to be.

“With a lover’s pain to attain the plain”
So sang from fourth grade in the older one’s brain.
A stronger current under surface of prose—
The memorized song of Lanier still flows.

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Pickens Progress

Posted on September 15, 2025 by Doug Cumming

My wife and I are living for a time in an Appalachian corner of Pickens County, Ga., watching sunsets over a 2,800-foot-high lake. They talk about “two Georgias.” This is the “other” one — rural, heavily for Trump in the last election, relying too much on state and federal dollars but with that old Scots-Irish individualist pride and clan loyalty. Pickens is one of 94 of Georgia’s 159 counties with more deaths than births each year, according to the the blog by my friend Charlie Hayslett, “Trouble in God’s Country.”https://troubleingodscountry.com/

The Oglethorpe Monument in Jasper, Ga., with the historic Pickens County jail in the background.
The Oglethorpe Monument in Jasper, Ga., with the historic Pickens County jail in the background.

The turnout in the last election was huge — very democratic, small “d.” As The Pickens County Progress reported it: “Pickens County voters turned out in big numbers in the November 5 election, with 80 percent of registered voters casting ballots. In the presidential race, Donald Trump (R) took 82.7 percent, or 17,263, of the Pickens vote, beating Kamala Harris (D) who took 16.76 percent, or 3,499, votes.”

You may wonder why this locally-run weekly newspaper is called the “Progress.” It has something to do with being started in 1888, honoring the agrarian Southern rebellion against the Gilded Age Republican Party, a “Progressive” movement that was not too happy with the Democratic machine either. The need for real progress here is still obvious. I look for it in the newspaper, and when I saw it recently, I wrote this letter to the editor, which ran a few weeks ago.

Editor:

Reading the news takes effort, but it’s worth it when you find nuggets of good news. I don’t mean “soft news,” like gardening tips or high school sports, as nice as those are in The Pickens County Progress. I mean gold nuggets like Sheriff Donnie Craig telling the Chamber of Commerce’s monthly breakfast that crime in Pickens County has been falling for the past five years. Burglary, thefts and assaults are all much lower in the county today than they were in 2019.

But I always want to know the “why” behind the statistics – not just good news but good journalism. (I was a journalist, then a journalism professor.) One reason for the drop in crime, Sheriff Craig said, is that deputies for the past year have responded to domestic calls accompanied by a mental health provider. He called this having a “co-response” team. Such teams had responded to 169 calls since Craig, elected sheriff for the fourth time in November, adopted this change last year, he said.

Anyone involved in crime fighting (or reporting on it) knows that a lot of the job comes from problems in homes troubled by domestic violence, addictions and untreated mental conditions. A weapon in the home can make it worse, but having a mental health worker to de-escalate the problem is an idea that doesn’t have to wait on our endless gun-control debate.

Craig, a Republican, admitted he was skeptical at first of having “counselors” at crime scenes. But seeing how it worked in practice, he called it “one of the best things” he has been part of. The counselors are empowered to follow up after the initial call, helping provide mental health services as needed.

As I read the news these days, local and national, I see how President Trump has succeeded in targeting real problems (crime, immigration, inflation, government inefficiency, you name it) that had evaded solutions – but he comes blustering in with exactly the wrong solutions. Good TV, as he calls it, but not real solutions. Sheriff Craig shows how real solutions take time, an open mind, an honest set of statistics, and a willingness to try something that comes from a different perspective.

Doug Cumming

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